Inkjet printing is a popular and versatile form of print imaging. The Assignee has developed printers that eject ink through MEMS printhead IC's. These printhead IC's (integrated circuits) are formed using lithographic etching and deposition techniques typically used in semiconductor fabrication.
The micro-scale nozzle structures in MEMS printhead IC's allow a high nozzle density (nozzles per unit of IC surface area), high print resolutions, low power consumption, self cooling operation and therefore high print speeds. Such printheads are described in detail in U.S. Pat. No. 6,746,105 and U.S. Ser. No. 11/097,308 to the present Assignee. The disclosures of these documents are incorporated herein by reference.
The small nozzle structures and high nozzle densities can create difficulties with nozzle clogging, depriming, ink feed and so on. Ideally, the printer components are designed so that they inherently avoid or prevent conditions that can have detrimental effects on the print quality. However, in practice no printers are completely immune to the problems of depriming, clogging, flooding, outgassing and so on. This is especially so given the range of conditions that printers are expected to operate in, and the atypical conditions in which users operate or transport printers. Manufacturers can not predict the user treatment every printer will be subjected to during its operational life, so designing printer components to accommodate every eventuality is impossible not to mention impractical from a cost perspective.